Monday, October 31, 2005

When I heard that Scooter might be going to jail to protect George, my natural reaction was: "Is Rizzuto really that loyal to Steinbrenner?" This caused my children to remind me once again that I am out of touch. Well, as Charlie Chan would say: "Indubitably."

Touch is not all I'm out of; I'm still out of power: who will speak for the powerless?

But a pal from ten miles north got his power back and generously stopped by to hook up his generator to my refrigerator, television, computer and a few light bulbs, so I finally have a few minutes to spend on line catching up with all the excitement. (I promised the neighbors to shut down the generator at 1 a.m., it being an awfully noisy contraption.)

Oh, and Tom, thanks for the plug about my dictated column. It's true, I shot the serif - but I did not shoot the deputy, or the intern for that matter.

And, my man Karnick, did I call the Sox thing or what? Cinderella finally gets to marry the ballplayer formerly known as Prince.

Thanks, buddies, for holding up your end of holding down the fort while I try to hold out hope and hold in my frustration.

Brother Jay Homnick, still without electrizical power in post-hurricane Miami, dictated every serif and comma of this piece of brilliance to a friendly but nettled intern over the phone, where it now appears on American Spectator Online.

Timely and sage (as is his custom), it chronicles how the torpedoing of the Miers nomination marks a coming-of-age for the righty blogosphere, from gadflies to kingmakers (or at least holders of veto power). We're here, we're queer (in our own way), get used to it.

The title refers to Greek tragedy and the MSM, and the article throws some baseball into the pot to create a lively stew. Taste it for yerself.

(It occurs to me that since Jay has no access to the internet, this would be a great time to talk about him behind his back. Hehe.)

The good Samuel Alito (who reminds me of Sandy Stern from the Scott Turow novels) will win confirmation without as much difficulty as many expect.

The O'Connor seat is not the crucial seat. Even if we have Alito, Scalia, Thomas, and Roberts, the other team has Stevens, Souter, Ginsburg, Breyer, and Mr. "Sweet Mystery of Life" Kennedy. This seat is not the one that changes the balance. It makes the middle depend almost entirely on Kennedy, that's all.

Where it's going to get ugly is if a Republican gets a chance to nominate Stevens' replacement.

Well, we're definitely going to have the War Over Judicial Philosophy that the hardliners on the Right were hoping for before the Miers nomination. Alito's position on issues likely to come before the Court is fairly clear, and his resume is impressive. It seems likely that he would be much like former Chief Justice Rehnquist on the Court, and that is a prospect that Democrats cannot enjoy, given that Alito has been nominated to replace Justice O'Connor, a rather waffly Rightist vote.

Initial opposition from Senate Democrats, however, was not as intense as one might have expected. Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (NV) said, "The Senate needs to find out if the man replacing Miers is too radical for the American people." Fair enough. Teddy Kennedy (MA) said, "Rather than selecting a nominee for the good of the nation and the court, President Bush has picked a nominee whom he hopes will stop the massive hemorrhaging of support on his right wing. This is a nomination based on weakness, not on strength." That may sound fairly harsh, but it's nothing when compared with the tirade he engaged in upon the nomination of Judge Bork to the Court two decades ago. Of course, there's still time for Teddy to ratchet up the rhetoric. . . .

The interim president of Planned Parenthood, a group that lobbies for universal, legal access to abortions, called the nomination "outrageous," which was only to be expected. Alito's position on abortion, however, has been more nuanced than the Planned Parenthood president's statement suggests. In 2000, he voted to strike down a New Jersey law banning late-term abortions, as unconstitutional. His reasoning in the case, however, appears to have been based on a simple attempt to follow the Supreme Court's Roe and post-Roe precedents in abortion cases. That does not quite tell us how he would vote if given a chance to affect the Court's position on those issues.

Samuel A. Alito Jr. to the Supreme Court. Whew. Now why couldn't Bush have just done that in the first place, and saved us all three weeks of unnecessary mudwrestling?

Since Alito is the un-Miers, oozing qualifications out every pore and with a fifteen year history on the federal bench to deconstruct, there will be more confusing information to digest than when you were trying to decide which flat screen TV to buy. We'll try to hold our own in what will be a crowded field, which I expect will be headed by Bench Memos, Volokh, the Right Coast, Althouse, and Southern Appeal.

Sunday, October 30, 2005

Several years back I caught a film on cable starring Willem Dafoe, Susan Sarandon, and Dana Delaney. I didn't see all of it, but what I did see was nearly hypnotic in its effect on me. Over the years I hoped I might run into it again, but I didn't know the title and didn't think about looking for it.

Recently, though, I found the film late at night. The title is Light Sleeper. It's a 1992 movie directed by Paul Schrader. Dafoe is fabulous as a drug dealer who has kicked his own addiction and is now looking to escape the essentially destructive life he's led. Five stars.

What got me this time around -- more than the story -- was the music, particularly a number by Michael Been titled "To Feel This Way." I had to do some digging to figure out the title of the song and the artist, but I did and ended up ordering the entire CD, On the Verge of a Nervous Breakthrough, of which it is a part. Wonderful, melancholy stuff. I just want to lay on the floor and listen to it, particularly the track that arrested me in the first place. Hits all the right mood notes, especially regret.

I also discovered (S.T. Karnick is somewhere going "No, DUH.") that Been was the main man behind the Christian band, The Call. I purchased some of their stuff which I don't like quite as well as the Been solo album. It's still good. One of the cuts was apparently used by the Al Gore 2000 campaign! Also found out Bono is a fan of the band.

We'll see if any other TRC types knew these interesting secrets before I did.

Saturday, October 29, 2005

Hi, everybody. I just spent a week doing things in the North Georgia mountains that three year olds enjoy and infants can tolerate. Thus, the putt putt golf courses, moderate length walking trails, and playgrounds of the region have all been visited and conquered.

Friday, October 28, 2005

Now that we have that whole "Miered" thing squared away, I think we need to mine the political insanity of the past few weeks for even more catchy neologisms that will attract the attention of wire services and Drudge. We have to be quick, though. When Miami's electricity comes back on, Jay will have so many pent-up puns to detonate he'll be sucking the oxygen out of the blogosphere for weeks. I'll start:

"If Mr. Libby had only borrowed my raincoat, stood in the shadows of a Washington parking structure, and just told the reporter, "Follow the wife," he'd be the hero of a movie in a couple of years. Instead of a bum, which is what he is, let's face it.

Not mentioning Scooter Libby's indictment would be conspicuous in its absence, so here goes. I hate chores, but I'll try to make it enjoyable and also use the term "unscrupulously torpedoed" at least once.

Now, writers at The Reform Club assume their gentle readers have a certain familiarity with the issues of the day. The details of this affair can be found and litigated elsewhere, and besides being too lazy to recap them, we would rather drink bourbon instead of scotch than conduct remediation without compensation.

First and foremost, anyone who was implacable about the violation of "the rule of law" during the Clinton impeachment circus would best help themselves and the republic if they just shut up and take their lumps. (This means YOU, Kay Bailey Hutchinson.) If there is no underlying crime here (and it appears there isn't), neither was there with Clinton. I mean, the Jones lawsuit was a civil case, for one thing.

This also puts the shoe on the other foot, although admittedly not as tightly. But the Libby indictment is for lying and obstructing, again with no underlying crime, so if we're to frogmarch him to the gibbet over that principle, it must be noted that Clinton was equally guilty.

I find the underlying crime, which doesn't exist, more to my own interest than the Law & Order aspects of the case:

Except for the crocodile tears crowd, no one is seriously maintaining that Valerie Plame's "outing" endangered anything or anybody. If she herself were concerned about the fate of her contacts, she wouldn't have posed for that cheesy photo in Vanity Fair.

Joe Wilson is a opportunist and a liar. (Don't take just my word for it--after two official reports debunking him came out, the Kerry campaign, which had co-opted him as an "advisor," dumped him like a bowelful of bad clams.)

Has-been/neverwas Wilson used his wife's access to get back into the Big Game. He secured an unpaid gig to go hang at the pool and drink mint tea in Niger and play International Man of Mystery, and when he got back, wrote an op-ed in the NY Times completely misrepresenting what he discovered in order to try to unscrupulously torpedo the Bush Administration and the war in Iraq. (And mebbe make some new friends, like future president John Kerry.)

Scooter Libby, as any loyal defender of his liege would, promptly and unscrupulously torpedoed Wilson back. That he had it coming was only icing on the cake, and that he indeed got sunk was the cherry on top.

So here we are.

I'm sure Mr. Libby would do the same again, because you don't let twits like Wilson endanger foreign policy, and Libby will dutifully if not cheerfully fall on his sword if necessary. But as right-thinking Americans, I'm sure we'll all presume Brother Scooter is innocent until proven otherwise. Perhaps, as he predicted today, he'll be "completely and totally exonerated."

He looks guilty as hell to me, but if he somehow slips the noose, I hope he devotes the rest of his life to tracking down the real leakers.

Thursday, October 27, 2005

Recently on this blog, a regular and valued commenter put forth that the current endangered state of the Black family in America was due to the legacy of slavery.

This idea is commonly held by both the majority culture and by Blacks themselves. I mean, we've all seen Roots. Kizzy gets sold, and Chicken George's family is scattered to the four winds. Seems a reasonable conclusion, then. Certainly white folks have no personal knowledge about this.

Roots is history, but it really isn't. For example, "jumping the broom" is a European, not African custom, although it is observed in Black America today compliments of Alex Haley, the author of Roots.

So, slavery certainly fractured the family, but it didn't die. Anecdotally, after emancipation there were tales of Black men scouring the countryside for traces of their families.

But let's stick to facts. Move on to W.E.B. DuBois studying Black families in Philadelphia. As early as the 1890s, just 35-odd years after the death of slavery, Black marriage and family rates were already nearly the same as whites:

"DuBois finds the similarities in marital statebetween blacks and whites surprising. He writes that'On the whole it is noticeable that the conjugalcondition of the Negroes approaches so nearly that ofthe whites, when the economic and social history ofthe two groups has been so strikingly different'":

"...[I]t must be remembered that the Negro home and thestable marriage state is for the mass of the coloredpeople...a new social institution. The strictlyguarded savage home life of Africa, which with all itsshortcomings protected womanhood, was broken upcompletely by the slave ship, and the promiscuousherding of the West Indian plantation....Withemancipation the Negro family was first madeindependent and with the migration to cities we seefor the first time the thoroughly independent Negrofamily. On the whole it is a more successfulinstitution than we had a right to expect..."--W. E. B. DuBois, The Philadelphia Negro: A social study.(1899)

Before we approach the 1960's, when a lot of funky social stuff happened, we see that Black and white marriage and illegitimacy rates are nearly identical. This is from Ebony Magazine:

"The percentage of Black women who are marrieddeclined from 62 percent to 31 percent between 1950and 2002." [The rate for whites in 1950 was 66%, not a statistically significant difference.---TVD]

"In 1963 when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gave his "IHave a Dream" speech, more than 70 percent of allBlack families were headed by married couples. In 2002that number was 48 percent."

"The Black family has crumbled more in the last 30years than it did in the entire 14 decades sinceslavery," says Dr. Julia Hare, author, psychologistand executive director of San Francisco's the BlackThink Tank."

So if I read my history right, the slave ships decimated the Black family, but Black folk adjusted to their heinous conditions, and after gaining their freedom quickly adapted to the American nuclear family structure.

The story of the American Black family is not an unbroken line from Kunta Kinte to 21st century baby daddies. Something happened in the 1960s, and I think we all know what it is. What's happened in these last 50 years has nothing to do with slavery and cannot be helped by politics. Social forces have threatened all families, but when whites sneeze, Blacks get pneumonia.

A call to return to the greatness Black America achieved, of adapting to an alien culture after being loosed from their chains with just the clothes on their backs, and not just surviving but thriving despite all the obstacles, seems to me a much finer message than one of perpetual hopelessness. I think mebbe there should be a march. A million men might show up to regain their legacy, one that was lost not so very long ago at all. Who knows?

A contributor to The Reform Club, a right-leaning blog, wrote that to get "borked" was "to be unscrupulously torpedoed by an opponent," while to get "miered" was to be "unscrupulously torpedoed by an ally."

S.T. Karnick, co-editor of The Reform Club, elaborated.

"If you have a president who is willing to instigate a big controversy, the prospect of being `borked' will be the major possibility," he said. "But if you have a president who is always trying to get consensus, then it's much more likely that nominees will get `miered.'"

I can't let the day pass without commenting on something truly timeless:

The Chicago White Sox have won the 2005 World Series!

As a native Chicagoan and congenitally athletics-minded individual, I have been a White Sox fan since childhood. This is a dream come true. What makes it even sweeter is that this team has played the right way and won the championship in a really entertaining, inspiring, and edifying fashion. They have fought hard all season long for this achievement, without famed superstars or big egos, and they have stuck together as a true team.

They truly deserve our respect and congratulations, and I hereby offer them to all involved. Cheers!

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In April 2002, I was sitting at my desk in my office at the U. of Minnesota when the phone rang. It was my physician's office, telling me that a radiologist had spotted a suspicious shadow on what until that moment had been a routine mammogram, and could I please hold while Scheduling arranged an ultrasound test.

HMOs, university medical centers, and myself being what they all are, it was three weeks later when once again, as I sat at my desk, my physician's office rang me up. The more sensitive ultrasound test had identified the potentially cancerous lump as nothing more than a pocket of adipose tissue. Clean bill of health. For three weeks I had been denying I was at all concerned. I put my head down on my desk and bawled so immoderately that my secretary ran in with a box of tissues in one hand and an airline shot of single malt scotch in the other.

Just over three weeks ago, I was driving home after dropping my daughter off at school when Ann Compton broke into the regular morning talk show with an ABC Special Report: George Bush was nominating Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court. I whimpered in impotent rage and disappointment. I knew this was bad, but didn't know it would keep getting worse, day after day after day.

This morning, I was driving home after dropping my daughter off at school when Ann Compton broke into the regular morning talk show with an ABC special report: George Bush had accepted Harriet Miers's withdrawal from consideration for a seat on the Supreme Court. I pumped my fist in the air and bellowed, "Yes! Yes!!!!" The sun shines again in the District. Tomorrow there may be bad news, but today is a day of respite. Simple common sense dictates that the relief I experience today differs not just in degree but in kind from the relief I felt at the news I did not in fact have a mortal disease. But heck if I can tell the difference.

I'm inclined to see this as a particular instance of a more general phenomenon, the replacement of the adult by the adolescent as the paradigm citizen.

Adolescents already know all they need to know. They are uninterested in what may have come before them and confident that it did so for naught. They see instantly into the heart of the world's problems and believe them to be simple of solution. They value sincerity, authenticity, getting real, over experience or effort. Approved attitude trumps informed opinion with them, and does so by means of social pressure rather than by, say, demonstrated efficacy. And their sense of entitlement can sometimes border on solipsism.

For some time now, and increasingly, our schooling, our politics, and our cultural life have played to the adolescent in us. Young students are encouraged to focus on their feelings and to express them in any way they find comfortable, while teachers are discouraged from correcting them. Officeholders and seekers rely on the sound bite and the scandal, not to mention their allies in the braying media, to steer or frustrate public policy. Jejune amusements are labeled "Adult." And the marketers who control our media and what passes for our national dialogue are only too happy to pander to the free-spending of any age or persuasion. It's a no-sweat world, and welcome to it.

The adolescentization of politics, begun in the 1960s, has given us the politics of gesture. A couple of years ago some 60-ish women of my acquaintance, as a protest of the Iraq war, went down to the beach and took their clothes off. This seemed to satisfy them, though as I watched the newspapers closely for days afterward I could detect no effect. We are increasingly countenancing an education of gesture, in which self-expression does not merely take precedence over but displaces that which is worth expressing; in which the tokens of achievement are wholly disconnected from achievement itself; in which teachers-in-training are being turned out of their chosen career, not on account of a subpar GPA, but because they fail to display the approved attitude toward certain issues of "social justice'; in which, to put it in plain and concrete terms, a majority of our high school graduates cannot read with comprehension the sixth-grade McGuffey Reader of yore. And do they care? lol

The interesting thing to me in the Miers withdrawal is the political angle: President Bush has managed to distance himself from the "radical right" wing of his party without noticeably damaging—and has perhaps even strengthened—the likelihood that he will be able to place another strict constructionist Justice on the Supreme Court. It is a classic case of triangulation.

Under withering attack from conservatives, President Bush ended his push to put loyalist Harriet Miers on the Supreme Court Thursday and promised a quick replacement. Democrats accused him of bowing to the "radical right wing of the Republican Party."See, I told you there was nothing to worry about!

I've been seriously considering spending real actual cash money to subscribe to the centrist (I'm told) The New Republic. That's TNR as opposed to NR, the National Review, for all you acronym Nazis out there. (NR, for the record, is the official publication of the American Nazi Party. You should subscribe immediately.)

The Family Manby Christopher Benfey Post date 10.22.05 | Issue date 10.31.05 During the half-century since his death in 1955, James Agee has maintained a saintly aura, though it remains unclear just what sort of martyrdom he suffered. He had in excess what used to be called "advantages." Born into comfortable circumstances in Tennessee in 1909, he was educated at Exeter and Harvard and employed by the Luce empire at Fortune and Time. Among his closest and most loyal friends were influential editors and publishers, many of whom he had known at school.

Tall and rangy, Agee was (as photographs attest) spectacularly good-looking, attractive to women and to men. As a writer, he was a quick study and a dazzling stylist, adept at many forms and many voices. His vices were those of his generation: alcohol, womanizing, a marauding egotism. Not quite a poète maudit--where is the curse in a Harvard education or a Luce paycheck?--Agee settled for the lesser role of the bad boy in powerful organizations; he had a temper tantrum when the Fortune editors tampered with his piece on the cultivation of orchids.

And yet the sense of martyrdom persists. His friend and Time colleague Robert Fitzgerald called the callous on Agee's right middle finger "one of his stigmata as a writer."...

You gotta be kidding me. I dunno who James Agee was, and I'm sure I would have found his spectacularly good-looking tall and rangy self attractive, but I hope he rots in hell, one not-quite-a-poète maudit to another. (And if Hunter Baker messes with my upcoming piece on hydrangeas, he's going to get some C4 up his wazoo, not some lame middle finger.)

I ain't no martyr.

And oh, yeah, TNR, you can forget about my 60 bucks, you godless bastards.

Wednesday, October 26, 2005

I'm not big on charging folks with hypocrisy. I suppose the difference to me is how one goes about things--if you aspire or try to inspire toward virtue but fall short, it goes with the territory of being human.

On the other hand, if you judge and condemn others for their shortcomings, then for with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged, like the man said. But still, I don't get much pleasure from purveying fire and brimstone, even when somebody has it coming.

"After researching the book I really truly believe that the leading lights of the Left — Moore, Franken, Clinton, Pelosi, Kennedy, etc. — really honestly don't believe what they are selling us. Their own experiences teach them that their ideas don't work."

Wow. Imposing standards that you don't even hold yourself? This is a whole 'nother kettle of fish.

Due to a bit of testing ineptitude on the part of her little darling, and a lot of a lack of money (she got fired for cussing on the air), little Sandra Jr. is now an inmate of the Los Angeles Unified Skool District. But what a turnaround from Mom! I was duly impressed with Ms. Tsing Loh's spirited defense of public schools in last Sunday's LA Times, castigating the paper for treating the LAUSD system as if it had "cooties." She's also taking a newfound joy in the cultural diversity that the public school system offers, and she suggested that "Times editors and writers should be required to live in the neighborhoods and send their kids to the public schools the paper covers."

Now, imposing standards on others she herself did not hold even a few months ago might open her to charges of hypocrisy, but not from me. I say good onya, Sister Sandra. But like anyone who gets religion late in life, say, Anne Rice finding Jesus, it'll be interesting to see if it sticks.

Novelist Anne Rice, author of numerous, bestselling gothic novels such as the highly influential series that started with Interview with a Vampire (and some oversexed romances under a pseudonym), has returned to the church after an absence of many years. (She left at age 18 and is now 64.)

According to Newsweek, Rice said that she "will publish Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt, a novel about the 7-year-old Jesus, narrated by Christ himself. 'I promised,' she says, 'that from now on I would write only for the Lord.' It's the most startling public turnaround since Bob Dylan's Slow Train Coming announced that he'd been born again."

It certainly is an interesting event, but as in Dylan's case, each author's earlier work provides hints of the change that would ultimately come. The Newsweek article notes that Rice "sees a continuity with her old books, whose compulsive, conscience-stricken evildoers reflect her long spiritual unease. 'I mean, I was in despair.' In that afterword she calls Christ 'the ultimate supernatural hero . . . the ultimate immortal of them all.'"

It will be interesting to see whether the novel is any good. Newsweek quotes Rice as acknowledging the risk: "Rice knows Out of Egypt and its projected sequels—three, she thinks—could alienate her following; as she writes in the afterword, 'I was ready to do violence to my career.'"

Tuesday, October 25, 2005

Reform Clubber Dr. Ben Zycher has an excellent column in today's Los Angeles Times, in which he analyzes why, in the light of "a possible—but unlikely—flu pandemic caused by a potential breakout of avian flu among human populations," the "greedy pharmaceutical producers" of the United States have not been "moving mountains in anticipation of this huge potential need, with all of the dollars that would follow."

Zycher's answer: previous federal government behavior toward makers of vaccines and pharmaceuticals—"orchestrated by those pro-business, pro-free enterprise, pro-capitalism Republicans," he correctly notes—has decimated the U.S. vaccine industry: "No business will make large investments that are likely to be confiscated by government, because investors will not allow it."

Zycher points out that although it is perfectly legitimate to say that people should contribute to the betterment of their fellow human beings, is is quite another thing for the government simply to take things from private individuals, without proper compensation, in order to keep their budget numbers looking good, as has been the case in the federal vaccine and pharma takings. Such policies discourage the production of things that benefit mankind and are therefore shortsighted and foolish:

The larger question is whether vaccine producers have a moral responsibility to accept large losses in order to save lives in the here and now. Those who respond with an unqualified "yes" commit two errors: They argue in the name of compassion that government ought to confiscate unlimited amounts of other people's money (products), and they ignore the future lives that will not be saved because of an artificial decrease in incentives to develop new and improved medicines. Yes, pharmaceutical producers have a moral responsibility to those in need. All of us who are more fortunate have that same responsibility, which therefore should be fulfilled through the public budget without confiscation of private property. After all, the 5th and 13th Amendments to the Constitution prohibit takings and involuntary servitude precisely so that political majorities may not impose losses upon unpopular groups.

If the government deems it a public good that people be given free access to a vaccine, the treatments should be paid for out of tax dollars.

Robbing Peter to vaccinate Paul will eventually kill both Peter and Paul.

Kathryn Lopez has an interesting interview with Peter Schweitzer on National Review Online today, discussing his new book, Do As I Say, Not As I Do. Schweitzer's book documents the many ways in which today's most prominent political left-liberals refuse to live according to the codes to which they hector the rest of us to adhere. The book shows, for example, how wasteful Barbra Streisand is, even though she perpetually criticizes the rest of us for falling for the consumer culture. It shows that Al Franken, who calls conservatives racists, has a worse hiring record of hiring African-Americans than Bob Jones University does. It points out that Michael Moore invests his money in Halliburton, Boeing, and HMOs, and that Moore, Nancy Pelosi, Ralph Nader, and many other left-liberals go out of their way to avoid hiring union labor.

Schweitzer acknowledges that conservatives have hypocrisies of the own, but that the press are aggressive in exposing these transgressions, and that, more importantly, the hypocritical acts of conservatives have a self-regulating component: they damage their own lives and those of their families, etc. The sins of left-liberals, however, actually make their lives better.

Yes, we are all hypocrites and I talk about that in the book. But liberal hypocrisy and conservative hypocrisy are quite different on two accounts. First, you hear about conservative hypocrisy all the time. A pro-family congressman caught in an extramarital affair, a minister caught in the same. This stuff is exposed by the media all the time. The leaders of the liberal-Left get a complete pass on their hypocrisy. Second, and this is even more important, the consequences of liberal hypocrisy are different than for the conservative variety. When conservatives abandon their principles and become hypocrites, they end up hurting themselves and their families. Conservative principles are like guard rails on a winding road. They are irritating but fundamentally good for you. Liberal hypocrisy is the opposite. When the liberal-left abandon their principles and become hypocrites, they actually improve their lives. Their kids end up in better schools, they have more money, and their families are more content. [Their] ideas are truly that bad.

Hence, Schweitzer's point is not that we should not listen to left-liberals because they are morally bankrupt as shown by their hypocrisy, but because their lives show that the ideas they advocate are not good, that they are well aware that what they are asking of others is unreasonable and unwise:

Lopez: Is there something about the book that sums something up philosophically about the Left?

Schweizer: After researching the book I really truly believe that the leading lights of the Left — Moore, Franken, Clinton, Pelosi, Kennedy, etc. — really honestly don't believe what they are selling us. Their own experiences teach them that their ideas don't work.

Monday, October 24, 2005

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Sunday, October 23, 2005

The abortion issue always gets my attention, but blogger is freezing me out of the comments section. So forgive another post.

Connie raised utilitarianism as an answer to the abortion issue, to which I respond:

Utilitarianism is a bankrupt philosophy. That has been demonstrated repeatedly. If you accept greatest good for the greatest number you can easily justify punishing the wrong person (even if you know it is the wrong person) for a crime in order to deter others from committing similar crimes.

What really happens with utilitarians is that they inevitably have to sneak other philosophical value models into their own in order to make it work. There is always a "why" lurking in the utilitarian's choices that goes well-beyond "greatest good for the greatest number" because it is a largely vacuous concept aside from the stark opportunity for one person to jump on a grenade to save several.

But EVEN that example raises questions. Why should one individual commit suicide to save a number of others? Why are several people more valuable than one? What is the justification there? I suppose it would have to depend on the value of persons. Utilitarianism takes that for granted and thus relies on some other value system (like Christianity), which is not shocking considering the heritage of the folks who started pushing utilitarianism. (Is Christ the ultimate utilitarian? He who ransomed his life for the billions? Unlikely, for he also emphasized leaving the flock untended to go after the single stray.)

Still, let's just accept utilitarianism in the abortion dispute. It gives us no answers. One utilitarian could say, "We must allow abortion because it is usually poor mothers who would give birth to these unwanted children and we would experience a strain on our social services PLUS we'd probably have more crime down the road." Another utilitarian could say, "We should compel these women to have the children because we have a growing population of the aged who must be supported by a growing pool of workers among our younger population." Both would be using utilitarian reasoning but delivering the opposite result. In neither case would either have any concern for human rights, which has interesting implications for utilitarianism as a method of governing.

Jay wondered why his fellow Jews are so detached from the pro-life movement which he believes is their heritage, to which I respond:

I think about Francis Schaeffer in this connection, Jay. When Roe v. Wade came down, the evangelical Christian society was out to lunch. They didn't care. You can find quotes from heavy duty Christian types expressing basic cluelessness on the issue. Schaeffer brought the sanctity of life issue to his community via the prophetic mode.

His basic message? This is evil and wrong. It is so evil and wrong that I and everyone else must question whether Christianity is real at all if you have no will to oppose it. You don't oppose it because you are too caught up in your real values of personal peace and affluence to care. He pierced some shells of indifference with that message and the evangelical world joined the Catholics as opponents of abortion on demand.

If a Christian can be prophetic about abortion, I KNOW a Jewish person can do the same. Who is that person, Jay?

There is a longstanding Jewish tradition that the standardized cycle of Bible readings throughout the year is somehow prophetically attuned to feeding you the appropriate information at just the right moment.

With Hurricane Wilma bearing down on us here in South Florida, I bestirred myself to the synagogue today to hear the once-a-year reading of Ecclesiastes, always done on the Sabbath which falls during the nine-day holiday of Tabernacles (which began last Monday night and ends this Wednesday night).

I was struck by the timeliness of the following verse (11:5): "Just as you do not know what is the path of the wind, like the enclosure of the full womb, so you cannot foretell the actions of the Lord, Who makes all." (My translation, radically unlike King James: "As thou knowest not what is the ways of the spirit..." The word ruach in Hebrew sometimes means "wind" and sometimes "spirit".)

The classic commentator, Rashi (1035-1105), explains: "There are times that you think you can recognize in the clouds that the windstorm is coming, but it does not arrive there because it passes by and heads to a different land... as you do not know the things that are closed and sealed in the full womb, and despite the fact that you can see the outward bulge you do not know what is in the womb... so, too, the decrees of the Omnipresent concerning poverty and wealth are hidden from you. Therefore you should not hold back from charity for worry of losing assets and becoming poor; you should not say 'I cannot take time from work to study the Torah or I will become poor'; you should not say 'I cannot get married and have children because they are too expensive'."

About 60% of us favor either more restrictions on abortions or an outright ban. Surprisingly, or perhaps not, that includes 56% of Democrats.

Huh.

As for who decides, men are actually slightly (40%-37%) more in favor of the current general availability of abortion than women. Women are also slightly (24%-20%) more in favor of an outright ban than men. So much for sexism. Go figure.

Women of childbearing age, under 45, were 2% more in favor of today's more liberal laws but they were also more in favor of a total ban than their older counterparts. Later for the smugness of menopause, then.

What can we learn from this? That the current law does not represent the moral consensus of this country, I'd say. Now, moral consensus in this country once permitted slavery, so it's neither infallible nor essentially good and moral. But as Scalia (and Bork I think) might argue, what else we got?

But doesn't any society, whether kicking it around the campfire or the internet, consider the questions of right and wrong, come to something resembling a conclusion, and proceed accordingly? Are we not men? Are we Devo?

We would not want to accuse the supporters of unrestricted abortion of working solely for own interests, modus vivendi-types as Rawls might put it, potentially pregnant sybarites and the men who are willing to chance knocking them up. Surely there's a principle at work here.

Roe is ostensibly based on an old, and secularly sacred (oxymoron, I know) document, our Constitution. The issue of abortion is nowhere directly addressed there, on this we can all agree. But the law of our land is now based on an interpretation of that document by five of our "elders." We're not even into GK Chesterton's "democracy of the dead," we're into Quetzlcotl time, bloodily and copiously appeasing some god named Jefferson, Hamilton or Madison because some high priests say it is the will of the gods.

"Living" document, indeed. And my faithfulness to it requires my own heart be torn out. Luckily for me, only metaphorically.

(As for CBS News' reportage, Ed Murrow (not to mention Dan Rather) would be proud. Take the data and explain it backwards. Somehow, some way, in some sort of miracle, a bare majority of us have trained ourselves how not to read between the facts. We shall continue to share the wealth.)

Connie made the following remarks on my post about abortion and the increased level of intellectual/emotional honesty we are hearing from various persons:

As a woman I get annoyed with men discussing abortion. They aren't the ones that have life changing decisions to make. I've been there, faced the medical consequences and said "damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead, I want my baby". But nobody else could make that decision for me.For the first few months after conception, the baby is irretrievably linked to mom. It can't survive without her and is factually a parasite (yes, she created the parasite). It gets into a sticky quagmire when we start assigning equal rights because the two can't be separated. That is, BTW, why I think partial birth abortions are an abomination and libs and feminists should be shot for supporting them.I would sacrifice right to abortions (sans life of mom) if the opponents would budge on access to education about birth control, sex, etc. To me its a trade-off to rare. If we would get teenagers information about sex and prevention we'd end up with less pregnancies. The quality of life for women goes down drastically the younger they are and having babies. Ditto for funding for child care, education as to adoption alternatives, etc.I have to take issue with a couple of things here and maybe agree with something else.

First, it antagonizes me and many other men to no end when women claim abortion is somehow off-limits for discussion. It hits on several levels.

I'm a human being and if I see something that appears to be a manifest injustice, then it's wrong for me to turn a blind eye. We are indisputably talking about a human being. A dependent human. A very small human, but a human.

I'm also a father of two. When my first child was in utero, my wife and I watched him on ultrasound for what probably amounted to hours (the wife had access to a machine). I was amazed by what he looked like and could do at even seven weeks. About halfway through the pregnancy, I woke up one morning to find my wife sitting on the floor of the bathroom crying because she was bleeding. We were afraid we were losing him. We got in to see a doctor before opening hours and got a scan. Our son was okay. My wife was immensely relieved. I'd been numb. After hearing the good news, it was like a dam broke inside me. All that fear and pain of loss I was holding at bay had to come out. The experience confirmed something for me. My feelings for our child were just as powerful as my wife's. Sure, I didn't carry him, but I was as fully invested in his life as anyone could be. I suppose what I'm trying to say is that just because some men don't give a damn if their child lives or dies inside the womb, others of us care like nothing else matters. We do not deserve to be X'ed out of the equation, here.

The part I'm willing to agree with you on is the social support end of things. If it were possible to make some grand bargain of the type where one side yields protection for the unborn child and the other yields national health insurance, I'd go along despite my reservations about big government and its ill effects. I think you'd be surprised by the large number of social conservatives feel that way. I've asked several and have never had anyone say they wouldn't go for that arrangement.

Friday, October 21, 2005

It's a fundraiser, but it is also intended to introduce the organization to interested parties. Sponsors frequently buy more seats than they fill, so they can probably find a place for the motivated attender.

The GFC dinner is always a great Atlanta event. Past speakers include Jack Kemp and Sean Hannity. This year features the new president of Focus on the Family, Jim Daly. GFC is a Focus-affiliate.

And just so you know, I'll be there. So look me up.If you're interested, email kylee@gafam.org.

Update: I've already had one well-heeled taker contact me and the above-mentioned Kylee. I've got room for a few more. Email kylee@gafam.org and give her your name and whether you'd like to bring a guest. Tell her I sent you.

By the way, this is typically not a bad place to meet state legislators.

Two commenters bring up the following cases regarding the definition of what is public:

What about a Greyhound bus?

Roads are constructed using taxes and thus are "public."

If a Greyhound bus is using said road, is it, in essence, being subsidized by the public?

Here is where I feel the argument about "public" can get expanded to mean just about anything.

I do not necessarily advocate that argument, but the argument does exist.

and

A more direct example would be a shopping mall that contains a police substation.

My answers:

The roads are public, but the vehicle is private. Smoking on a bus does no harm whatever to the road or any other vehicle on it. Hence, the vehicle owner has the right to decide on a smoking policy that fits the owner's wishes.

Expanding the definition of public further than this is sophistry, plain and simple, designed to enable people to enforce their will over property they do not own.

Item two. The shopping mall is owned by a private firm, and hence the owner has the right to decide on a smoking policy that fits the owner's wishes. If the police substation is owned by the public, the owners (i.e., the people through their government) have the right to decide on a smoking policy to have in place within that substation. If, however, the substation is owned by the mall owners and leased to the police or given to them free of charge, the mall owner has the right to decide on a smoking policy. Presumably, the owner would accommodate what the police desired, in order to ensure that the substation would remain in operation. But it would be up to the owner—and not anyone else—to decide.

OK, and now on to the next question that will be asked: What if the public, through their representatives, say that they will allow the police substation to operate only if the mall owners institute a particular smoking policy throughout the entire mall? Answer: It will then be up to the owners to decide whether the value of faster police protection outweighs the value of their preferred smoking policy. That will be entirely the owners' call.

I will say, however, that it is utterly dishonorable and wrongheaded of the public to force such a decision on a property owner. Society should provide a public service based on the value of that service to the effort of fostering ordered liberty, creating the highest amount of both liberty and order simultaneously—and on no other consideration. The attempt to constrain liberty (in the form of restrictions on private individuals' property rights) as a tradeoff for the creation of greater order is dishonorable (in that it uses threat of disaster as a means of cowing people into doing others' will) and inimical to the functioning of a free society.

Hence, it is wrong to impose a smoking policy on private buses as a tradeoff for the orderly movement of transportation, and it is wrong to impose a smoking policy on shopping malls as a tradeoff for efficient police protection.

A commenter on the smoking-bans issue has posed the following important question:

I believe the real question is what one considers "public".

I define a public space as being a common area, one owned by the public at large as opposed to a private owner. The fact that a property owner invites strangers onto his property cannot justly overwhelm his right to use his property as he sees fit in any way that does not affect other properties. A space does not become the property of the public just because an owner invites the public to enjoy its benefits if they should wish to do so. They have the right to stay away from that property, and therefore they do not have the right to control its use or conditions.

Here's a question: At what level of toxicity to others should an activity be prohibited in public?

The answer was evident in my previous posting, but I will restate it. (I will leave aside for the moment the question of whether secondhand smoke can be accurately described as toxic. We will kindly assume that the commenter was indulging in a bit of hyperbole.)

My position:

The government should regulate public lands, and owners of private spaces should make their own decisions regarding what kind and level of toxins they will allow, provided that these toxins do not move into other people's spaces (including public ones).

So, in practical terms, what level of toxicity should a tavern, restaurant, or store owner be allowed by law to permit within their own space? Whatever level they choose.

Biochemistry professor Michael J. Behe had just conceded in federal court that precious few scientists support the intelligent design theory, which holds that the machinery of life is so complex as to require the hand of an intelligent creator. Now came another question: Isn't it true, professor, that the nation's most esteemed scientific organization denounced the theory as non-science?

Behe, who is bespectacled and bearded, sat straight up in the witness chair.

"Their statement is a political document without any marshaling of evidence," Behe said with rising voice earlier this week. "Talk about scholarly malfeasance. . . . Science has marched on. We have now data to reopen the evidence for design in nature."

It has been hailed as another Scopes "Monkey Trial," in which the forces of science would again vanquish those who would inject religion into the science classroom. But as the trial in U.S. District Court in Harrisburg reached a midpoint this week, victory has proven elusive.

I no longer see abortion as directly related to sexual freedom or feminism, and I no longer see it strictly as a matter of personal privacy, either. It entails questions about life -- maybe more so at the end of the process than at the beginning, but life nonetheless.

This is not a fashionable view in some circles, but it is one that usually gets grudging acceptance when I mention it. I know of no one who has flipped on the abortion issue, but I do know of plenty of people who no longer think of it as a minor procedure that only prudes and right-wingers oppose. The antiabortion movement has made headway.

There is such a thing as cognitive dissonance. It is not possible to keep going as a culture that celebrates the ultrasound and the abortion license at the same time. Cohen is one more indicator of that fact.

One other thing, where are the conservatives on smoking bans? I can't think of any greater restrictions of freedom. If I own a restaurant and I want to let people smoke in it, why shouldn't I be able? Why should cities be able to tell every restaurant they can't have smoking.

This is one case I'd let free market work. If people want non-smoking restaurants, people will operate them and patrons will go.

I am not a conservative (I am a liberal of the right, also known as a classical liberal or English Whig liberal), nor have I ever smoked (in fact, I detest the smell of tobacco smoke), but I'll answer:

I am absolutely against government bans on smoking in private establishments.

I acknowledge that cities and states have the authority to impose such bans, but I think that they should not do so.

People should take a little responsibility for themselves. If you are bothered by other people's cigarette smoke but wish to drink in a particular tavern or eat in a particular restaurant, decide for yourself which you'd rather miss: the company and provender in that place, or fresh air. It's up to you.

To stay away from a restaurant because you think it disgusting that the owners allow people to smoke on the premises is a perfectly reasonable and honorable thing. And if enough people do so, the restaurateur will most likely get the point and find a way to accommodate both kinds of customer. On the other hand, to get the police to stop everybody else from smoking somewhere just that that the royal You can eat your vegetarian pasta dish without the risk that you might vaguely smell the smoke of someone's cancer stick—that is the height of swinishness.

The government's only role in this should be to ensure that private establishments are allowed and enabled to enforce whatever smoking policy they think best.

Wednesday, October 19, 2005

As many of you know, I'm on a 100 book tear as I prepare for my doctoral prelims. The latest book on my list was Robert Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia. I wasn't sure it would be more than a book to get through, but I was wrong.

First off, Nozick performs the most convincing take-down of John Rawls that I've ever seen. They were both high-powered Ivy League types, so I'd love to know if they ever discussed the issues in person. Probably not. Nozick praises Rawls to the heavens, but absolutely wins the debate as far as I'm concerned. I make the remark about Nozick and Rawls to tantalize. Go read it for yourself.

Second, and more to the point of this post, I found myself arrested by an amazing sequence in which Nozick shows anything more than a minimal state is essentially equal to slavery. I'm pasting it in below:

"The Tale of the Slave"from Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia, pp. 290-292.

Consider the following sequence of cases, which we shall call the Tale of the Slave, and imagine it is about you.

1. There is a slave completely at the mercy of his brutal master's whims. He often is cruelly beaten, called out in the middle of the night, and so on.

2. The master is kindlier and beats the slave only for stated infractions of his rules (not fulfilling the work quota, and so on). He gives the slave some free time.

3. The master has a group of slaves, and he decides how things are to be allocated among them on nice grounds, taking into account their needs, merit, and so on.

4. The master allows his slaves four days on their own and requires them to work only three days a week on his land. The rest of the time is their own.

5. The master allows his slaves to go off and work in the city (or anywhere they wish) for wages. He requires only that they send back to him three-sevenths of their wages. He also retains the power to recall them to the plantation if some emergency threatens his land; and to raise or lower the three-sevenths amount required to be turned over to him. He further retains the right to restrict the slaves from participating in certain dangerous activities that threaten his financial return, for example, mountain climbing, cigarette smoking.

6. The master allows all of his 10,000 slaves, except you, to vote, and the joint decision is made by all of them. There is open discussion, and so forth, among them, and they have the power to determine to what uses to put whatever percentage of your (and their) earnings they decide to take; what activities legitimately may be forbidden to you, and so on.Let us pause in this sequence of cases to take stock. If the master contracts this transfer of power so that he cannot withdraw it, you have a change of master. You now have 10,000 masters instead of just one; rather you have one 10,000-headed master. Perhaps the 10,000 even will be kindlier than the benevolent master in case 2. Still, they are your master. However, still more can be done. A kindly single master (as in case 2) might allow his slave(s) to speak up and try to persuade him to make a certain decision. The 10,000-headed monster can do this also.

7. Though still not having the vote, you are at liberty (and are given the right) to enter into the discussions of the 10,000, to try to persuade them to adopt various policies and to treat you and themselves in a certain way. They then go off to vote to decide upon policies covering the vast range of their powers.

8. In appreciation of your useful contributions to discussion, the 10,000 allow you to vote if they are deadlocked; they commit themselves to this procedure. After the discussion you mark your vote on a slip of paper, and they go off and vote. In the eventuality that they divide evenly on some issue, 5,000 for and 5,000 against, they look at your ballot and count it in. This has never yet happened; they have never yet had occasion to open your ballot. (A single master also might commit himself to letting his slave decide any issue concerning him about which he, the master, was absolutely indifferent.)

9. They throw your vote in with theirs. If they are exactly tied your vote carries the issue. Otherwise it makes no difference to the electoral outcome. The question is: which transition from case 1 to case 9 made it no longer the tale of a slave?

I thought about getting into my own thoughts about this passage and how it relates to my understanding of the Bible, for instance, but I decided to draw back and see what others might say. Discuss, if you like.

I have just received an coyly worded email from the Maryland GOP that is not quite coy enough to prevent me from concluding that Michael Steele, currently our lieutenant governor, is going to announce next Tuesday that he will seek the Senate seat being vacated when Paul Sarbanes retires in 2006. This is wonderful news for Maryland Republicans, and potentially a great moment for Maryland as well.

Michael Steele is the genuine article: a conservative Catholic African-American, he has lived his whole life in Maryland. He rose up through the ranks of county politics, and at the age of 47 is the highest-ranking black state political office-holder in the country. In 2002, the Ehrlich-Steele ticket took the statehouse away from the Democrats, in this bluest of blue states, largely because the black voters of Baltimore and Prince George's County were so ambivalent and apathetic towards the Democratic nominee, Kathleen Kennedy Townsend. In the intervening years Baltimore has continued to suffer under the leadership of the Democrat mayor, Martin O'Malley, while Prince George's has benefitted from the pro-growth state policies of the Ehrlich administration. The time may have finally come when Maryland Republicans can make some inroads with this key voting group, now that there are some concrete accomplishments we can point to.

After the disappointment of the Miers nomination, I needed some cheering up. And this does it -- I'm excited about this prospect.

In a recent article on Tech Central Station, health-policy writer John Luik provides an excellent analysis noting that the real cause of the rise in childhood obesity in recent years is infrequency of physical exercise, not dietary problems. Luik writes,

[A] recent Canadian study looked at the eating and physical activity habits of 4,298 school children in an effort to determine which risk factors were important for overweight and obese children. The researchers included questions about whether the children ate breakfast, whether their lunch was brought from home or purchased at school, how often they ate in fast-food restaurants, whether there were regular family dinners and whether dinner was eaten in front of the television.

The results are startling, for they disprove so much of what passes for contemporary "wisdom" about childhood obesity. First, eating in a fast-food restaurant (which according to the Fat Police is the major source of childhood obesity) was not statistically significant as a risk factor for obesity, even in children who eat in such restaurants more than three times a week.

Second, the study found that there was not a statistically significant difference between the quantity of fizzy drinks consumed by children attending schools that did not sell fizzy drinks and those that did. Children in schools that sold fizzy drinks consumed an average of 4 cans of soda per week, while children at schools which did not sell fizzy drinks consumed 3.6 per week. This works out to 33.5 and 32.5 grams of sucrose per day, with the extra gram adding four calories for the kids where fizzy drinks were sold—an insignificant amount in terms of total daily caloric intake.

Third, there was not a statistically significant association between the availability of fizzy drinks at schools or schools with food vending machines and the risk of children being overweight or obese. As the authors noted: "We observed that children attending schools that sell soft drinks consumed somewhat more soft drinks and sugar, but the amounts were likely insufficient to bring about differences in body weight."

In addition to this, research shows that kids who are normal in weight actually eat more "junk" food than their overweight peers. Luik cites a World Health Organization study released this summer which found that in "91% of the countries examined, the frequency of sweets intake was lower in overweight than normal weight youth." The study found a "negative relationship between the intake of sweets (candy, chocolate) and BMI classification in 31 out of the 34 countries such that higher sweets intake was associated with a lower odds of overweight," in the words of the study report.

This means that children who eat more junk food are actually less likely to overweight than their peers. In addition, the study found, "Overweight status was not associated with the intake of fruits, vegetables, and soft drinks."

Luik points out that these studies confirm the conclusions reached by countless earlier ones, some of which he cites, and he notes that their conclusions regarding physical activity are as follows:

While the Canadian study and others have failed to find a connection between fizzy drinks and childhood obesity, they have found a striking association between obesity and children's physical activity levels in general and the frequency of physical education classes at their schools in particular. "Children attending schools with more frequent physical education classes," they write, "were increasingly more likely to have normal body weight."

As for physical activity in general, they note that "frequency of physical activity appears to be the only activity-related factor independently associated with overweight."

Despite this clear evidence, however, schools continue to cut back on physical education classes while concentrating on getting "junk" food out of their cafeterias. The latter may well be a good thing to do, but it has virtually no effect in reducing childhood obesity. Educators should stop thinking so much about the cafeteria and vending area and should get the kids into the gyms and on the playgrounds.

Tuesday, October 18, 2005

Rafael Palmiero, the first baseman for the Baltimore Orioles and one of only four players to have hit more than 500 homeruns and 3000 hits, testified before the House of Representatives subcommittee on the illegal use of steroids. He looked at the interrogators, pointed at them with all the sincerity he could muster and said, “I have never used steroids.”

Fast forward several months. As a result of random drug testing it is now clear that Palmiero was using steroids.

Newspaper accounts blasted him for hypocrisy and an obvious lie, albeit he now says “he never intentionally used steroids” – an alteration in his statement that is probably impossible to prove.

What the press stories omitted, however, is that Palmiero’s lie was made under oath; in other words, he engaged in the lie of lies or perjury.

Here in unvarnished form is one of the great unmentioned issues of our time. Lying under oath has become a common practice undermining our system of law and justice.

As a dear friend of mine noted when his litigation was slogging through the court system, “Perjury is the problem with America.” As he pointed out, “Our defendant perjured himself in court documents to an astounding level…when we discussed whether this was actionable, most lawyers laughed. ‘Everybody lies. Forget about it. No one cares. Get on with your life.’”

Of course getting on with your life means rejecting fundamental principles on which the nation was founded. Our pledge of allegiance does proudly include “liberty and justice for all.” But what kind of justice is possible if perjury is permissible?

Many lawyers are passively complicit in this practice. After all, the more lies, the more delays, the more tactics to drag out the procedure, the more hours to be billed. At the root of this national problem are judges and district attorneys who allow perjury to occur as standard operating procedure. If perjury isn’t accompanied by an implicit act of enforcement, then it is tantamount to a non-event.

Civil perjury is a crime that has fines and possible imprisonment attached to it, but it is almost never enforced. Like mandatory long-term drug abuse penalties, a potential seven year prison term for perjury often militates against enforcement.

It may seem simplistic, but suppose the court system no longer tolerated lying. Suppose a realistic penalty were imposed, one that was fair and, at the same time, recognized that perjury was an egregious act that undermined our legal system. My suspicion is this would lead to a major transformation – a salutary transformation – in the American legal system.

I can understand why Rafael Palmiero lied before a Congressional Committee. His baseball achievements make him a virtual shoo-in for the Hall of Fame. However, this disclosure about steroid use puts his accomplishments in a new light. He is simply one of those “juiced” athletes who ignored the rules.

The same might be said of hundreds of defendants who believe lying is better than serving a prison sentence or they have rationalized perjury as a legitimate defense position.

If we avert our gaze to this growing problem, America will emerge with a post-modern legal belief that truth can never be obtained. For those who accept this contention, a system without truth is also a system without justice. At that point we might as well rely solely on what defendants tell us and ignore the factual basis for any judicial procedure.

This is a slippery path we are on. Should the public not awaken to the issue our court system could go the way of the dinosaur – an interesting relic of the past, but one that has little relevance to the present.

Five years before Blackford Oakes was Saving the Queen, a far less cultured, far more blue-collar super spy by the name of Remo Williams was taking popular fiction in a direction unheard of in the culture wars at that time: To the right.

If you're wondering where you've heard the name Remo Williams even though you've never heard of The Destroyer novel series, which has been chronicling Remo's adventures since 1971, lay blame at the feet of Showtime, Cinemax, and about a million UHF stations which have been running the dreadful 1985 film Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins" in endless midnight rotation for the past 20 years. And if you're unlucky enough to have seen the movie, rest assured that the film has about as much in common with the books that inspired it as Roger Moore's campy Bond had with Ian Fleming's cold, calculating master spy.

The foundation for all that follows is set up in the first book, Created, The Destroyer. Remo, a simple Newark beat cop, is framed for a murder he didn't commit, is sentenced to die in an electric chair that doesn't work, and is revived and bamboozled into working for CURE, a super-secret agency that operates only at the suggestion, never at the order, of the president. By the end of Created, Remo has become CURE's enforcement arm — its Destroyer — who, with the mercenary Chiun, does battle with America's enemies at home and abroad. It's a fight for truth, justice, and the American way, and if there's cynicism in the books it's directed at those who view such clear-eyed pro-Americanism as dated, jingoistic cliché.

Often the villain in a given Destroyer novel is guided by a left-wing agenda. Back in the 1970s, the Wounded Knee protesters were mercilessly mocked; the conservative dream of a U.N. out of the U.S. was finally, blessedly (albeit fictionally), realized; and Carter CIA head Stansfield Turner was rightly called to task for making a hash of Central Intelligence. More recently, the Clintons and their cronies came under repeated fire. The humor in the series is wickedly pointed and decidedly un-P.C. Environmentalists, Hollywood celebrities, and journalists in particular have been targets of satire in The Destroyer for years.

The Destroyer books really are great fun, and I hope that they will find a new publisher who is more in tune with what has made the series so popular during the past three decades.

Some people mark their lives in terms of great events. Others remember what they were reading at a particular time. During 1996-1997, I was in reading bliss because my father-in-law, a great book collector, loaned me a large box full of the adventures of Remo Williams: The Destroyer. During that year, I made my way through about 80 volumes of the awesome pulp fiction series and counted myself a lucky man to have such an interesting father-in-law.

Some of you are probably thinking the men's action/adventure genre is blandly similar. The hero arrives in town, has a shower, a steak, a woman, and then gets down to business blowing all the baddies away. Remo didn't fit that pattern. He was a former Vietnam vet/beat cop framed up for the express purpose of becoming the one man enforcement arm of a special organization named CURE. The group would freely violate the Constitution in order to enforce it.

Remo was trained by the Asian assassin Chiun, a self-satisfiedly racist old man with the deadliest hands and feet in the world. He accompanies Remo on his adventures because he can't stand to see his good work endangered. Remo is only a white man, Chiun reminds him, but he has almost transcended his racial limitations. The old Asian creates much of the comedic relief in the series, particularly as he interacts with hippies and other assorted leftists. They regularly praise him and give him honor because he's "third world," but don't realize that he is about as royalist and reactionary as anyone could be. Nevertheless, he soaks up their laurels. Chiun also amuses with his horrendous poetry.

Remo becomes almost as deadly as Chiun through his training and often resents his transformation from man to superman. He is bored with sex because he knows all the technical details about how to drive women wild. He also yearns for American junk food, but his body has been so purified he is only able to eat fish and rice, like Chiun. His body rejects anything else. Despite his annoyance with life as a super-assassin, Remo enjoys bringing bad guys (and girls) down and displays a lot of style in so doing.

Finally, there is the head of CURE, one Dr. Smith. Smith is simultaneously brilliant and terribly dull. He was selected to head the organization because of his lack of imagination. A visionary type would figure out how to turn CURE into a platform for subtle world domination. The highlight of Smith's day, on the other hand, is eating his usual prune whip yogurt. He runs things behind the scenes from the Folcroft Sanitarium.

The series was created by Warren Murphy and Dick Sapir. It was quite good until Sapir died and Murphy quit writing them. Since the 80's, it has been licensed to various publishers with varying results. Of late, Remo has been in the hands of a Canadian publisher who doesn't understand the property. Which is why I wrote this entire post, just to link to this National Review story about the recent fate of Remo.

I've been a little relentless. Reading Tom's posts send a message of re-focus and clarity. Seek truth in a community of friendship. He's right.

Unfortunately, there are more problems with the Harriet Miers nomination that should be discussed. First off is this strange report from John Fund about the teleconference between Christian conservatives and Texas judges Hecht and Kinkeade to discuss Miers. According to Fund, the two judges gave strong assurances that Miers would be a vote against Roe.

I should be happy about this, right? After all, I am seriously pro-life and have to try not to think about it too much to avoid being sick and miserable all the time about the loss of innocent life.

Readers and TRCers, I am not happy.

I do not believe that we achieve justice by stacking the court in favor of a particular position on a particular issue. It is basically a disgusting phenomenon that every time a Supreme Court justice is nominated all anybody wants to know is what they think about Roe. Even liberal legal types know what's wrong with Roe, it's just a matter of whether they will interpret the law squarely and fairly.

The right course, the only course is to choose nominees who are dedicated to interpreting the law and the Constitution in a manner closely tied to its text and intent. If we can find justices who will do that, it will not matter what their policy preferences are. We have lost something precious with the left-wing move toward justices who embrace policy over strict interpretation of law. To the extent that we should ever embrace that mistake, except to substitute right-wing preferences, then we, too, will be in error.

Now, we don't know how a Justice Miers would approach the problem since she lacks the indicators of judicial philosophy that would inform us. However, the Fund story gives all the appearances of a stealth nominee designed to stack the court on an issue rather than to give it a guiding philosophy. I think that's the wrong approach. If Roe is going to be overturned, then it had better be via the fairest and cleanest hands method available. The way to do that is to bring back a correct judicial philosophy. And the way to do that is to appoint judges who have thought deeply about the act of judging.

Monday, October 17, 2005

Derrida you can look up for yourself, but Wolf is of course the mastermind of the 68 versions of Law & Order, an episode of which is airing right now somewhere on cable regardless of when you're reading this.

In this course of my work, I lunched today with a grizzled litigator, a "trial dog," who in his younger days prosecuted and convicted Sam the Plumber DeCavalcante, a pretty big fish in the New Jersey Mafia.

His take on trial technique is that you find a hole in the other side's story, and you win. What if you're prosecuting, I asked. Same deal, he replied. Even when you have the burden of proof, you bullseye the other guy.

Ah, it occurred to me. That's what's happened to social intercourse. We're all lawyers now. We no longer hold joint inquiries looking for truth, like the old days of Socrates, symposia or the original Reform Club, whose members included polar opposites GK Chesterton and GB Shaw.

We look to prove the other guy wrong. That a flawed argument can contain more truth than the polished but limited one is an alien concept. A man's reach must equal his grasp, and may not exceed it, or else he is an idiot or a liar. We don't search for truth together anymore---truth is a solitary pursuit, and everybody else is our adversary.

To me that's a shame, because the Symposium, the original Reform Club, and the Algonquin Roundtable were parties, not an excuse to inflict one's misery upon others. Knock back a few, dress in women's clothing (in drag, I look a little like Susan Estrich), make a few bad puns, consider the universe, and mebbe walk away with something of lasting value or in the least, a good buzz.

I suppose there was a good time to be had at a public execution back in the day, although why escapes me. We put the truth on trial at all times these days, and it is always guilty. It's not surprising nobody says nothing anymore, because the hangman always wins. Everybody gets what they came for.

Hugh Hewitt has advanced the "powerful" argument that "constitutional law" just isn't that hard, so we shouldn't worry about whether Miers is a brainiac. The inferences aren't good for Miers and are worse for Bush's governing philosophy.

Is this really how we want to make our appointments? "Well, being head of FEMA isn't rocket science, so let's not trouble ourselves overmuch about getting the top, top candidate." Besides, constitutional law is harder than it looks and being a Supreme Court judge involves the rest of federal law, which is deep, complex, and confounding.

Sunday, October 16, 2005

Our friend Mr. Elliott will be happy to note that this column is not one that I considered to be a suitable venue for my trademark wordplay.

Regrettably I was impelled to spank the President. In private conversation, he uses a sort of prophetic language that has a legitimate context in human affairs. Yet he is careful not to use it on the national stage. Nobody could imagine him standing up and saying at a press conference or a stump speech (even in a church) that God told him to go into Afghanistan or Iraq - even if he believes in his heart that this is the case.

Then how is it smart or appropriate to tell it to the Palestinian "leaders"?

Saturday, October 15, 2005

Perhaps maybe the face of small business is changing. I'm a small consulting business (me and hubby). But where I live, lots of small retail businesses have had to close because they can't financially compete with large chains. Maybe it's not bad, but it is changing from ownership to worker.

Personally, I'd love to see more Republican support for small businesses.

Well, I think the GOP support for business in general obscures its support for small business, which employs about half of Americans, if I recall. Big business is actually closer to Hobbes' Leviathan, and elicits support from both parties alike as an easy mark to tap for political cash. (Republicans like it because it's business, Democrats like it because it's big and therefore more easily centralized and controlled. But it's mostly about the cash, and its contributions are self-interestedly fair and balanced.)

If I may imprudently help the other side, a Democrat push for "Buy American" (the current [or any] administration could hardly start an ideological trade war with China) would have great resonance in this here USA. Breaking our addiction to cheap but largely crap consumer goods from foreign shores would make economic sense as well as support our fellow Americans of the working class.

Not much downside, except for screwing with Wal-Mart, where America tends to go on Sundays after church, if not instead of...

Our resident anonymous liberal, Liberal Anonymous (which sounds like a good name for a self-help group), writes to my colleague:

Actions speak louder than words, Hunter, and Scalia has shown himself to be a rank hypocrite whenever he disagrees with the outcome of the law.

Aye, that's our real world, LA. We are all human, and thus vulnerable to rationalizations and therefore hypocrisy---although I personally think Scalia's batting average for fidelity to his judicial philosophy might make him the court's ranking non-hypocrite. To wit: Justice Ginsburg fully allows that Roe is bad law, but won't lift a finger to overturn it, or even tame it.

Do you favor turning your back on essential questions of right and wrong when the law dictates the contrary of your moral sense? I mean, surely a person of your obvious cosmic rectitude would have dissented in the Dred Scott decision.

Or as our current President Bush (two down, one to go) so eloquently put it:

"Another example would be the Dred Scott case, which is where judges, years ago, said that the Constitution allowed slavery because of personal property rights.

That's a personal opinion. That's not what the Constitution says. The Constitution of the United States says we're all—--you know, it doesn't say that..."

Precisely. Ah, the inarticulate speech of the heart: he is the master.

Trusty Slate lefty Tim Noah associates, and not unfairly, Roe with Scott, and why Bush says he wouldn't appoint someone so reasonable as to agree with the Constitution (at that time) on the latter.

I ask you this not to put you on the spot, LA, but to open the gates of heaven and hell to all on this Miers thing. I mean, it's far easier and quicker to learn someone else's mind than their heart, which is why I think Bush went this way. Peter Singer or FDR? Sensibility or sense? Nietzsche or Jesus? Justice or mercy? Winston Churchill or Viggo Mortensen?

"Be kind. It’s worthwhile to make an effort to learn about other people and figure out what you might have in common with them. If you allow yourself to be somewhat curious — and if you get into the habit of doing that—it’s the first step to being open minded… and realizing that your points of view aren’t totally opposite. I don’t think anyone’s are, in the end. It’s just a question of finding out by spending time with them or giving their ideas a chance to be considered."---Viggo Mortensen, Artist, Actor, Activist

(Very interested as to what Brother Viggo has found in common with al-Qaeda and the janjaweed, and to hear his plan for Congo, but that should not diminish the universialityness of his sentiment. I'd think we could count him as firmly in Ms. Miers' court. What a nice man. If he had spent 10 years at Harriet Miers' side, spending time with her and giving her ideas a chance to be considered, I'm sure he would have nominated her himself.)

The Reform Club, c. 1915

The home of classical liberalism, where the spirits of Winston Churchill, George Bernard Shaw, G. K. Chesterton, H. G. Wells, Hilaire Belloc and other intellectual adventurers live on. To all those of fair argument and good cheer, our doors open wide.